NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Jan 21, 2024

The Upper Michigan Blizzard of 1938

Yes, but can your blizzard do this? In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's Storm of the Century in 1938, some snow drifts reached the level of utility poles. Nearly a meter of new and unexpected snow fell over two days in a storm that started 86 years ago this week. As snow fell and gale-force winds piled snow to surreal heights, many roads became not only impassable but unplowable; people became stranded, cars, school buses and a train became mired, and even a dangerous fire raged. Two people were killed and some students were forced to spend several consecutive days at school. The featured image was taken by a local resident soon after the storm. Although all of this snow eventually melted, repeated snow storms like this help build lasting glaciers in snowy regions of our planet Earth.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Four Ax-3 Astronauts Board Station and Meet Expedition 70 Crew

January 20, 2024

Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) astronauts Michael López-Alegría, Walter Villadei, Marcus Wandt, and Alper Gezeravci are now aboard the International Space Station following Dragon’s hatch opening at 7:13 a.m. EST, Saturday, Jan. 20.

Ax-3 docked to the orbital complex at 5:42 a.m. while the spacecraft was flying 262 miles above the Pacific Ocean, west of South America. It is the third mission with an entirely private crew to arrive at the orbiting laboratory.

The Axiom Space crew are joining Expedition 70 crew members aboard station, including NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Furukawa Satoshi, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Konstantin Borisov, Oleg Kononenko, and Nikolai Chub.

Next up, the station crew members will take part in a welcome ceremony aboard the International Space Station.

Axiom Space astronauts are expected to depart the space station Feb. 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2024/01/20/four-ax-3-astronauts-board-station-and-meet-expedition-70-crew/

Google and AT&T join $155 million AST SpaceMobile investment

January 19, 2024

Google and AT&T have joined a $155 million strategic investment in AST SpaceMobile, which is set to raise double that to help fund its direct-to-smartphone connectivity constellation.

The strategic investment also includes funds from existing shareholder Vodafone, one of Europe’s largest telcos with a significant presence across Africa. It comes alongside AST SpaceMobile’s plans to draw up to $51.5 million from an existing debt facility and raise at least $100 million by selling discounted shares.

The capital injection will support AST SpaceMobile’s ambitions to deploy commercial services this year as the venture prepares to start producing spacecraft that would be twice as big as its first five 1,500-kilogram operational BlueBird satellites, known as Block 1 and slated to launch on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 before the end of March.

AST SpaceMobile has said each follow-on Block 2 BlueBird would have 10 times more capacity than a Block 1 satellite to deliver more performance for the low Earth orbit constellation, designed to enable AT&T, Vodafone, and other terrestrial mobile network partners to keep subscribers connected outside cell tower coverage.

BlueWalker-3, the Texas-based venture’s 1,500-kilogram prototype, achieved download rates of around 14 megabits per second during tests in September. Those tests also saw BlueWalker-3 relay a brief 5G phone call to an ordinary smartphone in a cellular dead zone for the first time.

AST SpaceMobile said in August that the five Block 1 BlueBirds were fully funded after taking out $115 million in debt.

AST SpaceMobile raised $417 million in 2021 by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a deal that brought the seven-year-old company to the Nasdaq stock exchange. The group has raised more capital since then, but has also quickly burnt through cash amid production delays and cost overruns that weighed on its share price

The venture priced its $100 million stock sale at $3.10 per share Jan. 18, a 25.5% discount over where the shares traded the previous day — and far from the $11.81 price reached at the end of their first day of trading April 7, 2021.

The equity offering is due to close next week, AST SpaceMobile said, and $15 million more could be raised if its underwriter opts to buy all shares on the table.

https://spacenews.com/google-and-att-join-155-million-ast-spacemobile-investment/

Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter

JANUARY 19, 2024

Carl Sagan popularized the maxim that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This advice should not be optional for policy makers. In today’s world of misinformation, conspiracy driven decision-making and sensationalist-dominated governance, our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking is eroding, with deleterious consequences for our ability to effectively deal with multiplying challenges of ever increasing complexity.

As director of the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), charged by Congress in 2022 to help bring science-based clarity and resolution to the long-standing mystery surrounding credible observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), also known as UFOs, I experienced this erosion up close and personal. And it was one factor in my decision to step down from my position last December. After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel and working with them to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena, our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.

The result of this whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same, was a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims—as if we didn’t have anything better to do.

The conspiracists’ story goes something like this: The U.S. has been hiding and attempting to reverse engineer as many as 12 UAP/UFOs from as early as the 1960s and perhaps earlier. This great cover-up and conspiracy failed to produce any salient results, and consequently the effort was abandoned to some private sector defense contractors to continue the work. Sometime later, the story continues, those private sector contractors wanted to bring the whole program back under U.S. government (USG) auspices. Apparently, the CIA stopped this supposed transfer back to the USG. All of this is without substantiating evidence, but, alas, belief in a statement is directly proportional to the volume in which it is transmitted and the number of times it is repeated, not the actual facts.

During a full-scale, year-long investigation of this story (which has been told and retold by a small group of interconnected believers and others with possibly less than honest intentions—none of whom have firsthand accounts of any of this), AARO discovered a few things, and none were about aliens.

First, no record exists of any president or living DOD or intelligence community leader knowing about this alleged program, nor any congressional committee having such knowledge. This should speak volumes if this case were following typical procedure because it is inconceivable that a program of such import would not ever have been briefed to the 50 to 100 people at the top of the USG over the decades of its existence.

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Second, this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace. In 2009 then senator Harry Reid asked the secretary of defense (SECDEF) to set up a SAP (special access program) to protect the alleged UAP/UFO material that AATIP proponents believed the USG was hiding. The SECDEF declined to do so after a review by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI), and DIA concluded that not only did no such material exist, but taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. This is well documented in open sources, particularly in records available on DIA’s electronic FOIA Reading Room. After the negative response by SECDEF, Senator Reid then enlisted the help of then senator Joseph Lieberman to request that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set up an SAP for the same purpose. The administrative SAP proposal package was informed by the same individuals who had been associated with AATIP. AARO’s archival research has located the administrative proposal for the DHS SAP, complete with the participants, which has been declassified and is being reviewed for public release.

Finally, the key purveyors of this narrative have known one another for decades. In the early 2000s several members of this small group also participated in a study, erroneously characterized (by the same participants) as having been sponsored by the White House, on the possible societal impact of disclosing the existence of extraterrestrials to the public, with the authenticity of the abovementioned concealed government program taken as its baseline assumption. The think tank in question was a “futures” enterprise that often worked on fringe studies, and many of the individuals involved with the study also worked for Bigelow Aerospace in support of the AATIP program.

AARO thoroughly investigated these claims as part of its congressionally mandated mission to not only technically evaluate contemporary UAP observations but also review historical accounts going back to the 1940s. One of my last acts before retiring was to sign AARO’s Historical Record Report Volume 1, which is currently being prepared for delivery to Congress and the public. The report demonstrates that many of the circulating allegations described above derive from inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures of legitimate U.S. programs or related R&D that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial issues or technology. Some are misrepresentations, and some derive from pure, unsupported beliefs. In many respects, the narrative is a textbook example of circular reporting, with each person relaying what they heard, but the information often ultimately being sourced to the same small group of individuals.

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The operational mission Congress has assigned AARO is important. Accumulating observations by highly trained U.S. military and other credible personnel of unidentified anomalous phenomena at or near sensitive national security areas and activities calls for a serious effort to understand what’s going on. Simply put, “unidentified” is unacceptable, particularly in these times of heightened geopolitical tension. Part of the problem we face today, however, is that the modern media cycle drives stories faster than sound research, science and peer review time lines can validate them. More worrisome is the willingness of some to make judgments and take actions on these stories without having seen or even requested supporting evidence, an omission that is all the more problematic when the claims are so extraordinary. Some members of Congress prefer to opine about aliens to the press rather than get an evidence-based briefing on the matter. Members have a responsibility to exhibit critical thinking skills instead of seeking the spotlight. As of the time of my departure, none, let me repeat, none of the conspiracy-minded “whistleblowers” in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their “evidence” and statement for the record despite numerous invitations. Anyone that would rather be sensationalist in the public eye than bring their evidence to the one organization established in law with all of the legal process and security framework established to protect them, their privacy, and the information and to investigate and report out findings is suspect.

I can assure you as its former director that AARO is unwaveringly committed to harnessing science and technology to bring unprecedented clarity to these fascinating, important, and stubborn mysteries and to do so with maximum transparency. Its talented staff and team of supporting scientists are at this very moment striving in collaboration with the armed forces, intelligence community, government agencies, national laboratories, scientific community, academic community—and soon the general public—to collect and analyze hard, measurable data—i.e., extraordinary evidence—in this heretofore eyewitness-rich but data-poor field. The AARO team will go wherever the data takes it, without fail, and will not be swayed by any attempts to influence its findings otherwise. Science cannot be left on the side of the road in the mad dash to uncover some great conspiracy. Carl Sagan would expect no less, and neither should the American people.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-what-i-learned-as-the-u-s-governments-ufo-hunter/

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NASA astronaut claimed he saw something ‘alien-like’ while in space

Jan 19, 2024 at 7:52PM

Former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin said he saw something strange in space.

Melvin’s revelation is adding more fuel to the fire we ignited when we began exploring space as humans.

Everyone wants to know whether’s there life out there and Leland Melvin says it’s possible – because he says he saw it.

There’s a famous blog titled ‘UFO Sightings Daily’ that’s run by Scott Waring.

Waring is constantly looking for proof of alien life and so he asked Melvin whether he’d ever seen anything out there.

Amazingly, Melvin actually said yes.

Melvin is a seasoned astronaut, having spent over 565 hours in space.

While this may pale in comparison to Frank Rubio’s experience, it’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Melvin said he didn’t really see something he’d call an UFO, but he said he did see something unusual.

“I thought I saw something organic/alien like floating out of the payload bay,” Melvin said.

Melvin described the alien being as translucent and curved, and organic, which is the key component of his statement.

https://supercarblondie.com/nasa-astronaut-leland-melvin/

Lombardo to caucus for Trump, vote “none of the above” in state-run primary

January 18th, 2024 at 9:04 AM

Gov. Joe Lombardo told The Nevada Independent on Thursday that he plans to caucus for former President Donald Trump and will vote “none of the above” in the state-run primary.

Lombardo made the comments in an 8-minute interview less than a month before Nevada’s Republican presidential primary and a separate Republican caucus two days later, saying that he planned to participate in both contests to maintain his voting record with the state, and so he could caucus for Trump.

“I believe [under President Donald Trump] the economic picture was better, more predictable, more stable. And then if you look at foreign affairs, [it was] more predictable and more stable,” Lombardo said. “I think he has the ability to move us out of the doldrums associated with President [Joe] Biden.”

Trump had endorsed Lombardo in his 2022 bid for governor, giving the former Clark County sheriff a leg up ahead of the state’s Republican primary. But Lombardo had opted to stay out of the 2024 presidential race, saying multiple times in the last year that he was “not getting engaged” in the race.

Asked why he was publicizing who he is voting for now, Lombardo said that for “all practical purposes … the race is over,” and out of the pool of available candidates, he believes that Trump is the best one.

Though Lombardo in September expressed some hesitation in voting for Trump amid four criminal indictments, including two in federal court, he said that since those indictments, the public has “learned a lot more” about the pending cases associated with Trump.

“I feel comfortable, and my belief [is] you're innocent until proven guilty,” Lombardo said. “And I think he is well situated to be successful moving forward on that case.”

Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony, a Republican, also issued a statement Thursday endorsing Trump, saying he would caucus for the former president and vote “none of these” in the state-run primary.

“I encourage all voters to do the same and take the next step to returning our great country to stability and prosperity,” he said.

In October, Lombardo called the concurrent state-run primary and caucus “confusing” and “unacceptable.” He said Thursday that he stands by that statement and wishes there was just one option for voters. The Nevada Republican Party adopted rules prohibiting candidates from filing for both the primary and caucus, leading to some confusion among Republican voters who have received mail ballots that do not list the former president or other top Republican contenders.

“I'm receiving phone calls from people that I respect in the community and have an understanding of the political world and news in general,” Lombardo said. “They're still confused that Trump and [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis are not [included in] the primary ballot …it's a convolution of information that has been brought forward in a short period of time.”

Lombardo said he is still determining where he will caucus.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/lombardo-to-caucus-for-trump-vote-none-of-the-above-in-state-run-primary